Then there’s the BMW’s Dynamic Stability Control settings. Predictably, it’s more time-consuming to operate and far trickier to fiddle with while driving than the nice row of buttons BMW employed previously. The same goes for fan speed, direction of the fan and anything else you can think of re: climate controls. BMW removed all of the hard climate controls from the center stack besides front and rear defrost, then tucked them into a new “climate menu.” Temperature control remains docked at the bottom of the touchscreen, but if you want to activate your heated seats, it requires a trip through the climate menu. Take, for instance, the climate controls. Something that could’ve been done with a single tap in a iDrive 7-equipped BMW now requires upwards of three or more taps. What the vast majority of my grievances boil down to is added complexity to complete tasks. Unfortunately, iDrive 8 takes a lot of iDrive 7’s best qualities, then throws them out the window entirely for a replacement that is worse.

Most of us on staff would agree that these are all big pluses for iDrive 7, including my co-writer for this piece, Senior Editor James Riswick.īoth Riswick and I (Road Test Editor Zac Palmer) spent separate weeks in new BMW i4s that feature iDrive 8, and we came away with similar complaints. The software itself is glitch-free, super-quick to respond, and the menu structure makes sense. There’s a perfect blend of hard controls and touchscreen controls for vital vehicle functions, and the iDrive knob ties it all together in a happy harmony. It hurts me to say this, too, for I’m easily the biggest advocate of iDrive 7 on staff here at Autoblog. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but BMW’s iDrive 8 does not follow this line of thinking. The software is tweaked to be better, and you gain more capabilities than before.

Screens become more responsive, brighter and clearer. Under normal circumstances, one would expect an infotainment system to improve in every way as it transitions from one version to the next.

Idrive update